COMMENTARY: MC baseball team impresses with mid-season turnaround

Published 1:02 pm, Sunday, May 4, 2014

Midland College's Blaine Prescott runs back to the bench after scoring against Western Texas on Saturday at Christensen Stadium. James Durbin/Reporter-Telegram

Midland College's Blaine Prescott runs back to the bench after scoring against Western Texas on Saturday at Christensen Stadium. James Durbin/Reporter-Telegram

Photo: James Durbin

COMMENTARY: MC baseball team impresses with mid-season turnaround

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The Midland College baseball team capped off one of the greatest mid-conference season comebacks on Saturday when the Chaparrals clinched a berth in next weekend’s NJCAA Region V Tournament at Texas Tech with a four-game sweep of Western Texas College.

The Chaps went from 2-14 to 19-17 in the Western Junior College Athletic Conference, good enough for fourth place.

The Chaps (34-22 overall) will now get a chance to defend their regional title from a year ago, although many would have doubted that would even happen with their tough start to WJCAC play.

I have to admit that when the Midland College baseball team was 2-14 in conference play, the thought that this just wasn’t going to be the Chaparrals’ year crossed my mind.

They weren’t getting key hits and they were piling up errors along with the losses.

But the Chaps had also faced the top three teams in the Western Junior College Athletic Conference this year in New Mexico Junior College, Frank Phillips College and Howard College in three of the first four series. The Chaps were also relying on a ton of freshmen and new faces in the lineup, which means that the chemistry took time to gel.

Sure, the expectations were big for a team with obvious talent but it’s also hard to compare this team to last year’s team that made the run to the Juco World Series.

Along the way, eighth-year head coach David Coleman remained positive about his team’s ability to recover. After all, Coleman has been there and done that as a coach, so losses aren’t going to be the end of the world. He also understands that it’s a process sometimes with young players and one can’t go pressing panic buttons when things don’t go right.

When the Chaparrals completed their sweep of the Westerners with 14-6 and 10-0 victories on Saturday, Coleman stepped to the side, had a big grin on his face and watched his team celebrate on the field.

“It kind of makes me emotional to think about it,” Coleman said. “People don’t understand if they don’t wear the uniform or not in the trenches what athletes go through. What I told them after the game is that they just got a valuable life lesson and it’s perseverance through adversity. They got to live it and flush it out for six weeks, being 2-14. When they got done they were 19-17. All the things they go through, that’s stuff that they’ll carry with them through their life, because bad things are going to happen to them as they get older, and that’s inevitable. You have to persevere through the adversity.”

The Chaps had to deal with their share of adversity and now are feeling good about themselves heading into the regional tournament, having won 21 of their last 25 games. MC plays North Texas Junior College Athletic Conference champion Grayson County (40-12) in a first round game at 1 p.m. Friday at Rip Griffin Park at Dan Law Field.

I asked sophomore catcher/first baseman Chris Shaw if there are any similarities with this team and last year’s team. Shaw said the team had a phrase last year of “hold the rope”. He said the whole idea behind the phrase is if someone is hanging off a cliff on a rope, who is the other guy hanging on to? Is he going to fight with everything he has to keep that you alive?

“That was the whole thing last year,” Shaw said. “It didn’t matter who any of the teammates were holding on to the other side, I knew they had my back the whole way and they’d fight, bleed and battle for me to give me everything I’ve got. Early on this year it wasn’t like that. Guys were feeling their way around and stuff like that was going on. Through everything we went through and through everything we’ve done, it’s exactly like it was last year. It’s that same mentality of I don’t care who’s at the plate, I don’t care who’s on the mound, they’re going to find a way to get the job done and have our backs the whole way.”

At the end of the day on Saturday, the Chaps let many people know, they were better than what they’re record showed early in the WJCAC season, and now they believe they can win, which makes them very dangerous at the regional tournament.